This will talk will take place on Tuesday 12 September, 1.15pm–1.45pm, in the UCL Special Collection Reading Room, South Junction (next to the UCL Shop!). Jacquie Glomski, UCL Honorary Senior Research Associate, will present a talk on John Evelyn’s Contribution to Restoration Bibliophily.

John Evelyn’s Instructions concerning Erecting of a Library (London, 1661) was a translation of Gabriel Naudé’s Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Paris, 1627, 1644), the most famous and influential early modern treatise on book collecting. Evelyn’s translation shows that he kept up with French trends and was concerned that English Restoration bibliophiles should not lag in their enthusiasm for establishing great libraries.

This is a chance not only to hear about Jacquie’s research, but also to see UCL Special Collection’s copy of this fascinating volume, which will be on display in the Reading Room.

You are warmly invited to a new series of half-hour talks in which researchers will introduce individual items from UCL’s rare-books collections.

These talks will give our researchers an opportunity to share ongoing discoveries and new observations about the selected item, while audiences will be able to share their expertise and find out a bit more about the larger collection to which the item belongs. Booking is not required: just turn up!

The first talk will take place on Tuesday 5 September, 1.15pm–1.45pm, in UCL Science Library Room 417. Cerys Jones, PhD Student in Medical Physics, will present a talk on Seeing Beyond the Visible: Multispectral Imaging applied to Heritage Artefacts.

Detail from a humidity-damaged letter, Karl Pearson Papers.

Multispectral imaging consists of capturing images of an object illuminated under ultraviolet, visible and infrared light. This technique enables faded text and pictures on historical artefacts to be recovered and reread. Cerys will be discussing the process of multispectral imaging and image processing, and present results from multispectral imaging applied to artefacts from UCL Special Collections and other heritage institutions.

Our next speaker will be UCL Honorary Senior Research Associate Jacquie Glomski on Tuesday 12 September. More information on her talk, John Evelyn’s Contribution to Restoration Bibliophily, will be forthcoming.